Post by Swamp Gas on May 1, 2007 19:38:08 GMT -5
The case for global warming has grown all but irrefutable, yet the skeptics have enjoyed enormous influence, for the audience that matters most to them occupies the White House
www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/05/skeptic200705
A Convenient Untruth
For the obligatory "opposing view" on climate change, the media often turn to Myron Ebell, policy analyst, sound-bite artist, and oil-industry mouthpiece. While mainstream experts see global warming as a major crisis, the hotter it gets, the better Ebell likes it.
by Michael Shnayerson May 2007
Myron Ebell in his office at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in Washington, D.C. Photograph by Jonathan Becker.
Al Gore says global-warming skeptics are a group diminishing almost as rapidly as the mountain glaciers.
Myron Ebell begs to differ.
Hurricanes, heat waves, flooding, and droughts—sure, they've stirred some fears. And some corporate allies that used to mock global warming—such as Detroit's Big Three automakers and oil giant Texaco—have, like the glaciers, melted away from the fight. But, for the hardest of the hard core, these are glorious days.
Like holdouts in the Alamo, the last of the skeptics plug away at the thousands of mainstream scientists now arrayed against them. They take potshots at the scores of studies that say global warming is here, aiming for small incongruities. And they bridle when asked if they take money, as nearly all do, from ExxonMobil.
Many of the skeptics are curmudgeons: old, bald, and bitter. But not Myron Ebell. Tall, slim, and youthful at 53, his blond hair swept back from a handsome face set off by serious glasses, Ebell is one of that rare breed, an elegant nerd. On television, facing interrogation by moderators who clearly feel he should be tarred and feathered for his views, he stays cool and fires back with withering zingers. In the recent surprise hit movie Thank You for Smoking, based on Christopher Buckley's novel, actor Aaron Eckhardt played a tobacco lobbyist who jokes about being a merchant of death and gleefully outdebates all comers. Ebell could easily star in the sequel, Thank You for Warming.
Ebell is a public-policy wonk—not, he hastens to clarify, a lobbyist for the energy industry, as many of his fellow skeptics are, or a scientist whose research is underwritten by the energy industry, or a politician who takes contributions from the energy industry. He lives in a suburb of Washington, D.C., where he and his wife are raising four children, ranging in age from an 11-year-old son to a 21-year-old daughter, all of whom, Ebell says proudly, take a skeptical view of global warming. He goes to work at a think tank on Connecticut Avenue called the Competitive Enterprise Institute (C.E.I.), where his office is modest, but not his influence.
Every day, journalists around the world call C.E.I. for its take on the latest global-warming studies, and Ebell, or one of his colleagues who also deal with the press—Marlo Lewis, Iain Murray, and Christopher Horner—happily obliges. The journalists like to air all views—"on the one hand, on the other"—so they plug in Ebell's latest retorts, giving them equal weight with new scientific findings. Gore is right in one sense: almost no scientist doubts that global warming is here, that man-made greenhouse gases are to blame, or that if we don't cut back on those gases fairly soon we'll be in a heap of trouble. But as the "other hand" in all those news stories, Ebell and his quotable cohorts sustain the impression that a scientific debate is still raging. The more studies that confirm global warming, the more ink Ebell gets. Journalist Ross Gelbspan, a longtime skeptic-tracker, says that's how the skeptics operate. With those doubts neatly planted in the press, the public shrugs, politicians push the problem off to another day, and ExxonMobil parries new fossil-fuel regulations, earning more windfall profits in exchange for a pittance to the skeptics and their work.
Like its ideological soulmates, C.E.I. has taken money—a considerable amount—from ExxonMobil. Ebell says that's irrelevant. "We're not beholden to our donors, because we don't say, 'If you give us this money, we'll do this project,'" he explains, tilting back nonchalantly in a C.E.I. conference-room chair. "I can't even quite tell you who supports us on global warming." In fact, Ebell could go to the ExxonMobil Web site and see that in 2005 the oil giant gave C.E.I. $270,000, a not inconsiderable portion of the institute's $3.7 million budget, and that between 1998 and 2005 ExxonMobil gave it more than $2 million. He could also ask one of his colleagues and learn that C.E.I. gets money from the American Petroleum Institute, various pharmaceutical companies (Dow Chemical, Eli Lilly), and William A. Dunn of Dunn Capital Management. But he says he's never done that. Since its founding, 23 years ago, by free marketer Fred Smith as an all-purpose bullhorn against government regulations, C.E.I. has simply tinkered with issues it chooses—from higher mileage standards in cars (bad) to the Endangered Species Act (worse)—trying to affect public policy and hoping donors come along for the ride.
That may be how C.E.I. sees it. To ExxonMobil, though, C.E.I. has been one of the brightest stars in its constellation of climate skeptics. Other oil companies fund global-warming-skeptic think tanks through the American Petroleum Institute, and various coal interests weigh in, too. But, for the skeptics, ExxonMobil is Big Daddy.
From 1998 to 2005, ExxonMobil spent a reported $16 million funding climate studies at some three dozen institutes. The recipients range from the well-known right-wing clearinghouse American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research ($240,000 from ExxonMobil in 2005) to the obscure Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow ($90,000 in 2005), bookends to a Who's Who of skeptics. None of these groups has any standing in mainstream climate science. Their fellows and scholars crank out policy papers that purport to disprove the latest findings about global warming and only rarely publish studies in peer-reviewed technical scientific journals. Instead, the institutes publish the papers themselves or get sympathetic newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times to run them as op-ed pieces. From there, the papers are taken up by a handful of lawmakers—such as Oklahoma Republican senator James Inhofe and Texas Republican congressman Joe Barton, who deride global warming as an alarmist hoax—and get disseminated on the Internet like viral advertising. It's an all too effective approach.
The stars, as in any constellation, are an eclectic bunch. They include fringe scientists such as David Legates and Patrick Michaels, of the George C. Marshall Institute ($115,000 from ExxonMobil in 2005), a Washington-based public-policy think tank; economists like Kyoto Protocol–basher Margo Thorning, of the American Council for Capital Formation ($360,000 from ExxonMobil in 2005); and historical-climate theorists such as the Battling Idsos—father Sherwood, sons Craig and Keith—of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change ($25,000 from ExxonMobil in 2005), who say high levels of CO2 in the prehistoric era led to lush plant life and better times for all. The skeptics appear on one another's panels, defend one another's work, and give the public the sense that mainstream scientists are nothing more than so many Chicken Littles. The case for global warming has grown all but irrefutable, yet the skeptics have enjoyed enormous influence, for the audience that matters most to them occupies the White House. Eagerly, their papers have been snatched up by the Bush administration as rationales for all manner of public policy, from striking down the Kyoto Protocol to blocking any cap on carbon dioxide emissions.
